


Petunia Dursley and the Uncommon Life

by mayachain



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Dubious Ethics, F/M, Good Petunia Dursley, Harry Potter was Raised by Remus Lupin, Infidelity, Pre-Hogwarts, Vernon Dursley is a Muggle
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-15
Updated: 2018-11-15
Packaged: 2019-08-24 03:25:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,347
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16631993
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mayachain/pseuds/mayachain
Summary: Remus Lupin went to seek out Petunia soon after Harry was given into her care.





	Petunia Dursley and the Uncommon Life

Remus Lupin went to seek out Petunia soon after Harry was given into her care. She didn’t want yet another _freak_ in her life, much less one who’d survived while her sister had not, but she was alone in the house with two toddlers and she was grieving and trying to pretend there was nothing to grieve over and… it was all too much, is the thing.

There were valid reasons for why Harry had to stay with her, why she could not simply give the boy to Remus. It mattered little that the man clearly loved Lily’s son and wanted to be in his life. 

But there were no valid reasons, she found, why she could not accept the help that he offered. So she did.

Little Harry spent several hours a week with Uncle Remus, which gave Petunia time to focus on her own son. It lessened the obsessive overindulgence Dudley had begun to receive before Remus had come. Eventually, she even consented to letting Lily’s friend take both boys for two hours once a week. 

It was nice to have time to herself.

. . . 

Remus could hardly afford the clothing he would need to fit in at Wisteria Lane, but that was what glamours were for. To Petunia’s neighbours, he was James’ bachelor brother who was clearly not suited to adopting his nephew but ‘bless him for helping the happy young couple who took the poor boy in’.

Vernon… was not happy, exactly, but he was also such a Muggle that the notice-me-not-charms made him forget Remus even existed most of the time. There was rarely ever a reason to meet him. ‘Decent fellow,’ was how he described Lupin if asked, and so the man’s presence in Privet Drive was accepted.

. . . 

Petunia had no love for Dumbledore. Remus owed the man a great deal, but even he was uneasy with the way Harry had been dumped on Petunia without even the slightest personal touch. It did little good to chalk it up to the chaos right after the war had ended – right after Harry, or Lily, had ended the war. It did no good that he could guess at the thought process behind not giving Petunia a chance to refuse to his face. Remus hated to think it, but the truth was that on the night of his parents’ deaths Albus had gambled with little Harry’s life, and that – especially knowing how Vernon reacted to magic – Remus would not forgive.

He had never informed Albus that he’d found out where the old man had placed James and Lily’s son. Steps had been taken to ensure no others who might remember that Lily had had a sister would find the Dursleys the Muggle way, but beyond that, nothing. It was none of Albus’ business. Remus might have been in a haze of grief and had sought the child with the best intentions, but one need only look at what had happened when the Longbottoms had thought they could let their guard down.

No.

The less people knew of his connection to Little Whinging the better.

. . . 

Harry was four when he moved into the third upstairs bedroom. Originally, it had been smaller than Dudley’s erstwhile nursery due to the layout of the house, but then Remus had read up on magical expansions. By the time the boys were deemed too old to share, size was no longer a problem. It was far trickier to add the second bathroom that the house had been sorely lacking.

By Harry’s fifth birthday he had transformed the cupboard under the stairs. It now housed a small apartment, complete with a reinforced cell for the full moon, a study and a kitchen.

Remus had been wary of transforming inside the house. To Petunia, inviting a wizard inside her home had been the most dangerous thing she could think of. Harboring a werewolf under fortifications was nothing.

. . . 

When the boys started school, it soon became apparent that Dudley was struggling. Vernon loudly brushed the issue aside, but the boy was not afraid to ask for help from the male authority figure that he had aside from his father. 

Remus was happy to do some tutoring. He also gave Dudley a charm that made reading a lot easier.

Vernon prattled that Dudley had only needed to find his stride. Petunia had a few talks with the teacher. Harry squinted and scrunched up his nose and got used to his glasses.

Dudley loved magic.

. . . 

Remus had trouble holding down a job, but he had a family, he had stability. Petunia received money from the Potter vaults to take care of Harry. It wasn’t hard to stretch that amount to feed another mouth, even an adult. It was only right that Remus should benefit from the money too because Petunia didn’t know how she could ever have done it without him.

He cast spells every day that helped with Petunia‘s housework, and it freed her up to pursue interests of her own. She decided against applying for jobs outside the house but eventually wrote a column in a local newspaper under a pseudonym. She made a name for herself writing about finding normalcy in ‘freakish’ dreams. Trying out mundane interpretations helped her reconcile the magic that had found its way into her once very Muggle home. 

The pay she earned went toward luxuries which Vernon didn’t need to know about and that she wouldn’t feel right to use Lily’s money for Harry for.

. . . 

It took years before Petunia admitted that her marriage with Vernon had taken an _unorthodox_ turn. Under different circumstances, they could have had the foundation of a perfectly normal life. Now, Petunia’s life contained _magic_ and Vernon continued to deny and vehemently ignore its existence.

The modifications Remus had performed on the blood wards with Petunia’s consent and the spells he’d placed all around the house after the first eruption kept Vernon oblivious of so much that was going on. Petunia found that her husband was so incredibly ordinary and… boring.

He wouldn’t have needed magic to light up her life. She would have been fine if there had been something else with how long she had searched for an alternative to magic as a teen. 

There was nothing.

Petunia and Vernon had very little in common anymore except for being Dudley’s parents. Even that was fraught because Dudley knew about magic, was part of the magic even though he was a Muggle himself, and his father knew nothing about it. Could know nothing about it.

. . . 

Petunia and Remus had no intentions of ever starting an affair. Both would forever deny it was ever inevitable that it would happen. This was how it happened: 

They slept together once, and while they both tried to figure out what it meant Remus handed her a bottle full of a potion meant to stop unwanted advances. ‘Not to cause impotence,’ he said, ‘simply to curb interest.’ It was for Petunia to use on whomever she wanted, be it her husband or Remus.

Remus hoped she would outright tell him if he ever started something she was not fully behind. Vernon, by contrast, still believed himself happily married and thus might want to sleep with his wife – if Petunia wanted to, that was her decision to make, but in case she didn’t and couldn’t think of a way to explain, the potion would help Vernon lose interest for some time.

Petunia would never have believed it of herself, but here she was the de-facto mother of two children and the wife of a husband who completely refused to become part of the very real magical lives they lived. The sight of the man she’d once loved now filled her with contempt. Time and time again Vernon had had the chance to discover reality and participate, but he’d never grabbed it, and now… 

. . . 

Remus and Petunia were very conscious of the fact that Remus was a wizard like Lily, and Petunia would remain a Muggle forevermore. This did not change no matter what they got up to when the boys weren’t home. It did change, however, during the weeks and months after the Wolfsbane Potion recipe was published.

They could not afford to buy it. They _could_ plant most ingredients in their garden and decrease the cost. Remus could not brew it by himself, but – urged on to experiment by sufficient motivation – Petunia could prepare parts of it, and Remus, if covered by several layers of protection, could stir and thus infuse his magic into the vile slosh.

The potion a master such as Snape might have brewed would have been infinitely more efficient, but to Remus, the effects the two of them managed to achieve were a godsend. Petunia was happy to be a vital part of the magic that was partly curing her very good friend. 

. . . 

They knew that filing for divorce would be the sensible choice. A divorce, however, would draw attention Petunia wanted to avoid, and more than that… 

The truth was that it was just very convenient for all of them to continue to benefit from Vernon’s job at Grunning’s. Petunia took care to use Vernon’s money for the upkeep of their house and food for Vernon and Dudley and herself, feeding and clothing Remus and Harry from the money provided to her by Lily and the money she and Remus both made sporadically, but… Vernon’s job translated into very much needed security. 

There was no lying to herself; she was exploiting Vernon Dursely and doing it quite cheerfully. The man hardly knew anymore that there was even a family that was supposed to be his living in his house. 

Her greatest worry was that her treatment of his father would prove somehow damaging to Dudley, but Dudley had come to understand it as a smart way to prevent violence and was therefore content to let himself be spoiled by Vernon and leave things at that.

. . . 

The advent of the Wolfsbane Potion brought a change beyond making Remus’ life more tolerable during the full moon. With Petunia able to participate in magic even the tiniest bit – all she had ever wanted since finding out Lily was a witch – she was finally in a state of mind where she could think about her nephew’s eventual reintroduction to the Wizarding World. 

They talked it over carefully. With the help of glamours and Polyjuice they could all four of them go to Diagon Alley, although maybe it would be better to try one of the lesser known smaller magical townships first. Petunia didn’t outright dare request the key to Harry’s vaults, but as far as anyone knew she was Lily Potter’s legal heir along with Lily’s magical son – and, though Remus had little doubt of how the boy would turn out, legally Dudley was Lily Potter’s potential magical heir as well until he turned eleven and his Muggle status was confirmed. 

Petunia pondered for a while if she should contact Dumbledore despite her reservations and claim she had changed her mind about keeping her family far away from Wizarding Britain – a resolve that had gone out the window a week after she’d made it simply by the fact that Remus had arrived on her doorstep – but she didn’t want anyone who wasn’t immediately involved know her affairs, that much hadn’t changed.

. . . 

Remus took up teaching Harry about magic more deliberately than he had so far. Not too much, because it needed to be in good fun without pressure, and because too much foreknowledge might result in Harry sticking out too much among his future class mates. But basics, background things magical children soaked up like sponges. Just seeing Remus perform spells and play-practice wand movements. And if some of those movements were of the sort that were regularly used in Defense… Eventually, Remus’ involvement would come out regardless of what they did, and in the meantime, being prepared could hardly hurt.

There weren’t many points of contact between the Dursely household and the Wizarding World but there were enough of them that Remus knew that Dumbledore believed that Voldemort wasn’t truly dead. He and Petunia fervently hoped that the man who’d killed James and Lily and so many others would remain ‘not truly dead’ for a long time yet, but since it was a question of _when_ Harry would become a target, not _if_ , it was best to be prepared.

Petunia cried and cried the day Remus found a way to mingle Harry’s blood with Dudley’s so that when the boy eventually left Privet Drive to go to Smeltings, he would be protected should someone try to make _him_ a target. The two boys might as well be brothers, after all.

. . . 

They did not raise the boys in fear. Harry and Dudley didn’t deserve it and Remus and Petunia both knew that if they tried then the ghost of Lily Potter would skin them. They raised them to keep their heads instead, to be aware of their surroundings, to have healthy self-confidence. Dudley would surprise everyone at Smeltings who ever knew Vernon Dursley. Harry would have a well-developed sense of self and be his own wizard, no pale replica of either James or Lily.

Remus was doing the job James should have been doing, that Sirius should have been doing. He was glad it was himself and not Peter, a thought he felt guilty about seeing as Peter had died trying to confront a traitor. Petunia was doing the job Lily should have done, that Alice no longer could.

It made her so helplessly furious despite the rapport she and Remus had, that she might have been able to rely on another woman, a magical woman, for input, if not for the kind of people that had taken Lily from her and Harry in the first place.

They were doing the job in place of the people they’d loved. If the way they were doing it might get them arrested if anyone found out… Who except their sons was there who had any right to judge?

 

.


End file.
